1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a radio communication apparatus for use with a mobile station of a radio communication system.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, a digital mobile communication system has provided a character data service for allowing communication terminals to exchange character data. Each communication terminal has a key input portion and a display portion (such as a liquid crystal display). With the input portion of the communication terminal on the transmission side, the user can input a desired message as a character string code. The message being input is displayed on the display portion. In the communication terminal on the reception side, the received character string code is converted into character data and displayed on the display portion.
When a message described in English is communicated, a space is placed between each word. A message is communicated as a character string code including space codes between each communication terminal. Thus, as shown in FIG. 11, a character string that composes one word may be displayed on two lines. To prevent a word from being divided, the transmission side may manually add a required number of space codes to a character string code. However, such a method results in increasing work. In addition, the number of characters displayed on the display portion may vary in each terminal unit. Moreover, when a communication is broken due to a deterioration of a radio communication environment such as fading, to minimize the length of communication data, it is undesirable to use space codes to fill in a line.
As another method, control codes may be placed in a character string code. However, in this method, since the communication data becomes long, this method is not proper.
Thus, since it is preferable to minimize the length of the communication data transmitted between communication terminals, it is preferable that a communication message is composed of only character codes. However, in this case, since a character string that composes a word as in English is often displayed on two lines, the user cannot easily see the resultant message.